The War that Never Was
by CuChulainn X19
Summary: Short fic to deal with my issues concerning Discovery. What appears to be a temporal anomaly lands the Enterprise-D at the cusp of a Federation-Klingon war, but all is not as it should be. Will note as a crossover once Discovery has its own category.


Captain Philippa Georgiou sat back in her chair and waited for the Klingons to respond. The bridge was tense; they stood in space before the largest potentially hostile fleet the peoples of the Federation had encountered since the Romulan War.

An alarm broke the silence, but it wasn't the Klingons.

"Captain!" Lieutenant Saru called, "there's some sort of spatial anomaly opening directly behind and above our formation. There's… it looks like a ship coming through!"

"Onscreen!" Georgiou ordered.

The vessel was massive. It easily dwarfed even the Klingon flagship, its deflector dish and warp nacelles looking like some futuristic version of Starfleet technology. The letters on the bottom of the enormous, oval saucer section read, plainly: NCC-1701-D.

"That's a Starfleet vessel," Georgiou breathed, almost disbelieving her eyes.

* * *

"Status report!" barked Captain Jean-Luc Picard, rising from his chair to stare in disbelief at the scene before him. On the main viewer, dozens of early-era Starfleet vessels were arrayed against at least as many alien vessels, the construction of which bore no resemblance to anything he'd ever seen.

"The anomaly has deposited us in the same spatial location at which we entered it, Captain," reported Lieutenant Commander Data. "Transponder codes indicate that the ships facing away from us are indeed Starfleet. However," he tapped several commands into his console, and paused momentarily as the data came up, "none of them have been in active service in at least sixty years, and the ship at the center appears to be the USS _Shenzhou_ , decommissioned in 2254 when Starfleet determined that her systems were too old to be effectively upgraded. Based on the absence of _Constitution_ -class cruisers at a flashpoint in this region of space, I would estimate that we are currently in the 2230s, if not earlier."

"Life signs on the Starfleet vessels are human," Lieutenant Worf added before Picard could comment. "But the alien ships… sir, sensors say they are crewed by _Klingons_!"

"Correction," Data noted. "The alien lifesigns are largely Klingon, but appear to have undergone significant genetic mutation. It is possible they are Augments like those encountered by the original _Enterprise_ in the 2150s. However, that is only one of numerous possibilities."

Commander William Riker, Picard's first officer, joined his captain on his feet. "Those don't look like any Klingon ships I've ever seen. Is there anything in our records?"

Data tapped his console. "While Starfleet records of Klingon ships are far from perfect, none of the alien vessels match any known Klingon design, nor any known design at all. Moreover, while the central vessel bears superficial resemblance to various designs of Klingon battlecruiser, it is the only ship to do so, and its power distribution and degree of ornamentation are at odds with all periods of Klingon engineering design and aesthetic and military philosophy."

"Decommissioned Starfleet ships and Klingons in nonexistent vessels?" Picard asked rhetorically. "Mister Data, get me a quantum resonance scan. Counselor Troi, do you sense anything?"

"Mostly tension," the half-Betazoid answered, allowing her eyes to half-close as she focused. "The lead Starfleet ship—someone aboard is radiating… panic. Despair. Whoever it is believes a war is inevitable. From the Klingons I sense… anger. Righteous anger, resentment, lust for battle, pride. They came looking for a fight, Captain, but I don't think it ends there."

"This seems far too close to open war for a moment in our timeline," Riker observed. "There were battles, of course, but nothing like this sort of standoff until 2267."

"We need to know what's going on here," Picard mused. "Mister Worf, open a channel."

* * *

" _This is Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS_ Enterprise _,_ " the hail sounded over speakers.

"That can't be right," Saru protested. "The _Enterprise_ is captained by Christopher Pike; they're on the other side of the Federation right now."

"Onscreen," Georgiou ordered, not pausing to note that this was clearly not Pike's _Enterprise_ , and the potential battlefield was replaced with the image of a bald man in a red-and-black uniform the _Shenzhou_ 's captain had never seen.

"This is Captain Philippa Georgiou of the USS _Shenzhou_ ," she introduced herself. "This is rather unexpected, Captain Picard."

"Indeed," the bald man replied, smiling thinly. "If you'll pardon my ignorance, Captain, what year is it, by your reckoning?"

"2256."

* * *

A/N: Short, low-quality fix-it fic for the fact that Discovery is broken. Issues not addressed that I may write a second chapter to deal with, or may not: Burnham's position as XO, for which she is manifestly unqualified and apparently untrained; the "Vulcan Hello," which operates on a canonically vacuous stereotyping of Klingon culture; and the notion that T'Kuvma's acquisition of a cloaking device would wow his fellow primitives rather than making him look like a coward who'd done a deal with the Romulans to boot.


End file.
